Oklahoma City and "the territory" / Tracy Floreani -- Ghosts of Tuskegee / Caroline Gebhard -- Morteza Drexel Sprague / Matthew McKnight -- New York City, 1936-1946 / Sara Rutkowski -- The U.S. merchant marine / Paul Devlin -- Fanny Ellison / Colleen Eils -- Rome, 1955-1957 / Sara Marzioli -- Postwar New York / Andrew Davenport -- Albert Murray after 1962 / Paul Devlin -- Visualizing Black identity in Ellison's fiction / Lena Hill -- Alternating currents : electricity, humanism, and resistance / Jennifer L. Lieberman -- Sounds and signs of Black womanhood / Meina Yates-Richard -- Masculinity / E. Al-Tariq Moore -- Aesthetics of democracy / Sterling Lecater Bland, Jr. -- Black power and Black arts / Matthew Calihman -- Wrestling with the far right : Ellison's representations of fascism / Kevin Moore -- Southwestern swing / Steven Lewis -- The self-fashioned American blues identity / Kimberly Mack -- Ellison's durational view of bebop / Michael Germana -- The Harlem Renaissance / Michael Borshuk -- Ellison's early writings / Barbara Foley -- The Wright School / Stephan Kuhl -- Literary modernism / Tessa Roynon -- Beyond Raglan's hero : Ellison's ritualist influence / Bryan Crable -- Sociology / Scott Selisker -- The soapbox speech in Ellison's fiction / Granville Ganter -- Postwar literary aesthetics / Jesse McCarthy -- Ellison as correspondent / Marc C. Conner -- Critical reputation, 1994-2020 / Paul Devlin and Robert Butler -- Reading Invisible man by design / Kinohi Nishikawa -- Reception of the Hickman novel / Benji de la Piedra -- Reception of the essay collections / Matthew Lambert -- Reception in the USSR and former USSR / Olga Panova -- Biographies of Ellison / Timothy Parrish -- Ellison and digital humanities / J.D. Porter.
Summary:
"Lewis and Ida Ellison settled in Oklahoma City in 1910, a few years before the birth of their first son Ralph Waldo on March 1, 1913. They had migrated west from South Carolina, like many African Americans from the deep South, in hopes of opportunity and an escape from racial violence in a new state not yet under the hold of Jim Crow. Oklahoma had only been a U.S. state for three years when they arrived. Before 1907, it was Oklahoma Territory, and before that, Indian Territory (1830s-1890), occupied and managed by some three dozen tribes native to or relocated to the region prior to the Civil War. "The Territory" had come to be a haven for famous outlaws, but for many it also represented possibility: a chance for new immigrants to find good work in an unbiased setting, like the Italians who mined coal for the Choctaw Nation; freedom from the status quo for those who felt confined by the social mores of the northeast; a chance for single women to own property; and space for new communities, such as the approximately fifty, self-governing all-black towns and settlements that dotted the pan-shaped map"-- Provided by publisher.
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